Drive the Parkway out of downtown Sevierville toward Pigeon Forge and the good stuff is all ahead of you: outlet shopping, mini golf, acrobatic pirates, a Walmart locals swear is among the busiest anywhere. Before any of that there’s a dead stretch of road, mostly houses and a campground and a gas station nobody slows down for. Behind the pumps of that Marathon station sits a grill counter that has been cooking since 1961, and Dolly Parton, who died in August 2026 at 80, told a magazine it was her kind of joint. She named her order, too. A slaw dog, about two and a half bucks, buried under coleslaw.
Her order was a $2.49 slaw dog
A slaw dog is a hot dog topped with coleslaw, yellow mustard and chopped onions. At Frank Allen’s Market & Grill, chili is part of the build as well, so if you order one “all the way” you are getting chili whether you planned on it or not. The price has been listed at $2.49, and the specialty dogs run two for $5, which makes lunch for two people cheaper than a single sandwich almost anywhere else on that strip. Prices move, so treat those as a ballpark.
One visitor who asked reported the wieners are Elm Hill brand, and that the grill will cook yours on the flat top or drop it in the fryer. A deep-fried hot dog is not something most people think to ask for, and it is worth knowing the option exists. The slaw itself has its own small reputation around Sevier County, separate from the burgers.
The place has been there since before Dollywood
Frank Allen got into the grocery business at 13, making deliveries on his bicycle before going to work in his father’s store. He and his wife Ernestine opened their own market in 1953 and added the grill eight years later, in 1961. The hot dogs and hamburgers are what eventually made the name.
The market moved a couple of times over the decades before landing where it is now, in the back of a gas station with an ordinary snack-and-drink store up front. Allen retired in 1997 and handed the business to his daughter and son-in-law. The family sold it in 2017 to KenJo Markets, an East Tennessee convenience store chain. Frank Allen died in 2021 at the age of 90.
What Parton actually said about it
The endorsement came in a 2010 Southern Living interview. “Everyone is always looking for a ‘joint’ to eat at that only locals know. Frank Allen’s is a local Sevier County experience I love,” she said. “My favorite is their Slaw Dog, but you’ll have to eat your way through the menu and find your own very favorite treat. Just be sure to tell them Dolly sent you.”
She brought it up again exactly five years later, in the June 2015 issue of Delta Sky, the Delta Air Lines in-flight magazine: “They have the best slaw dogs in the county, and you might just see my bus parked there as I pick up lunch.” That is a specific kind of praise. Not a photo op, not a partnership. Lunch.
The cheeseburger is what the locals order
Ask around Sevierville and the burger comes up before the hot dog does. Readers of The Mountain Press, the county paper, have voted it the best cheeseburger in Sevier County year after year. The paper’s own count put the streak at eight consecutive years as of 2010. Higher numbers get repeated online and none of them trace back to the paper.
The patties are made from scratch, cooked on a flat top crowded with burgers, dogs, eggs and hash browns. A cheeseburger has been listed at $4.49 and a double bacon cheeseburger at $6.89. It is a diner burger, not a chef’s burger, and that is the entire appeal.
The two-foot sub and everything else on the board
The most expensive item on the menu has been the Super Granddaddy at $7.99, a two-foot sub packed with five meats and two cheeses. There’s a Chuckwagon with a country fried-style beef patty, a pimento cheese sandwich, and the usual sides: onion rings, crinkle-cut fries, coleslaw by itself.
On the hot dog side, the slaw dog shares space with Nacho Dogs, Inferno Dogs loaded with jalapeños, Bacon Cheese Dogs, BBQ Dogs, corn dogs and plain ones. Steak burgers too. It’s a short menu board that has not tried to reinvent itself, which is rare on a road where every other building has a costumed mascot out front.
Coleslaw on a hot dog is not a gimmick
Northerners tend to squint at the idea. The slaw dog traces to West Virginia, where a drive-in near Charleston was advertising hot dogs with slaw by the early 1920s. Researchers say it spread during the Great Depression, when wieners and cabbage were both cheap and both easy to get. From there it moved south and picked up local accents.
The West Virginia version stacks coleslaw over chili, mustard and onions. The Carolina slaw dog is chili, slaw, onions and mustard, and in North Carolina the mustard is not optional. What varies there is whether the slaw goes on at all. Some places swap in a BBQ slaw made with ketchup instead of mayo. Some skip the chili entirely. The reason it works at all is temperature and texture: cold, creamy, crunchy slaw against a hot dog and warm chili. Balance matters, and a slaw that’s too sweet against a chili that’s too spicy ruins the whole thing.
Don’t go expecting to bump into her
There are two small 8×10 photos of Parton on the wall above the griddle. Headshots, not snapshots taken in the building. That’s the whole shrine. Anywhere else on that strip, a quote like hers would be on billboards from Sevierville to Gatlinburg, and here it isn’t even on the front window.
Inside it looks like an old soda shop: a counter you can sit at and talk to the cooks, a row of booths, and a kitchen table parked in the middle of the store that the owner put there for the regulars. A group of locals takes that table most mornings for coffee.
The gas station dog fit the rest of her menu
Nothing about the slaw dog was out of character. Potatoes were her favorite food, any style. “I never met a spud I didn’t like,” she said in an interview clip her TikTok account later reposted. Her father farmed corn and tobacco, and she grew up eating what the garden gave them.
Asked by PureWow to name her favorite condiment, she said butter, then cream, then bacon grease. Lots of butter, salt and pepper, she said. The family meatloaf ran about two parts beef to one part pork, bound with rolled oats instead of breadcrumbs and finished with a glaze of ketchup, brown sugar and mustard. She made it for Miley Cyrus, whose honorary godmother she was.
Chicken and dumplings was her specialty, and she never handed over the real recipe. When Today asked in 2022, she said she doesn’t give it out, then offered up the main secret ingredient: love. The full version printed in Good Lookin’ Cookin’, the cookbook she wrote with her sister Rachel Parton George, is her sister’s. Her favorite appetizer was clams casino, made with chopped clams, because she didn’t want to chew through a big one.
How to actually get there
Frank Allen’s Market & Grill is at 930 Parkway in Sevierville. Heading toward Pigeon Forge there’s no turn lane at the gas station, so you either blow past it and make a U-turn or turn just before and take the little one-lane access road around to the back of the lot. The grill opens at 6 a.m. and closes in the late afternoon Monday through Saturday, and it is closed on Sundays. Listings disagree on the exact closing time, so call ahead.
Set your expectations honestly. This is a hot dog cooked on a gas station flat top, not a project sausage smoked over hickory by somebody with a certificate from Bavaria. People who make the drive on Parton’s word describe it as a genuinely good slaw dog at a price that makes the whole argument moot. The burger is the better order if you only get one.
What she was really pointing at was the room. A woman who could have eaten anywhere kept naming a counter in the back of a Marathon station in the county where she grew up, one that opened when she was a kid and still looks the part. That’s the thing worth driving for, and the slaw dog costs less than the parking at most places that get this much attention.
